HISTORY OF THE WORLD WITH THE WOMEN PUT BACK IN

Originally written for children, this book was a huge hit with adults too, written in a conversational style without dumbing down. "Putting the women back in doesn't mean we have to push the men out", say the authors. It is not a history of the world's women, but the story of the world giving more prominence to those women we do know something about, from the ancient Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut who created remarkable buildings that still stand today, to the 20th century software engineer Margaret Hamilton who wrote the computer code that enabled Apollo II to land on the moon. Around 3.2 million years ago, the African proto-human "Lucy" lived, so called because her modern researchers were listening to the Beatles song "Lucy in the sky with diamonds". Leaping forward in time, about 3000 years ago Assyrian women were required to wear a veil, the first known instance of women being treated differently from men. In the third millennium BC the people of the Indus valley built houses in Mohenjo-Daro that had flushing toilets, and an enigmatic bronze statue of a girl survives from the same city. In the Christian era there was a new social mobility, and the Byzantine empress Theodora started life as a circus performer but caught the eye of the emperor Justinian, who changed the law to marry her. Together they created iconic buildings like the Hagia Sophia. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan's grandson Kublai Khan became emperor of China but his cousin, the female warrior general Khutulun, prevented him from entering his kingdom, while the European explorer Marco Polo also had to take an alternative route. In 18th century Russia, Catherine the Great promoted the science and philosophy of the Enlightenment, and in 19th century America and Europe the fight for civil rights and suffrage was pursued by hundreds of brave women. 922pp, softback.